Examples of Allusion in Literature: 6 Short Stories That Borrow a Reference
Quick answer: Allusion examples from O. Henry, Chekhov, Poe, Hawthorne, Wilde and Melville, showing how a borrowed name or story adds a second layer without stopping the narrative.
An allusion is a reference to something outside the story, a myth, a scripture, a historical event, another book, that the writer expects the reader to recognise. It is a shortcut: one name imports a whole set of meanings. The risk is exclusion. A reader who misses the reference should still be able to follow the story; the allusion is a second floor, not the foundation.
Six borrowed references
The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry names the wise men in its title and closes by comparing Jim and Della's foolish gifts to those of the Magi, who invented the giving of Christmas presents. Earlier the narrator says Della's hair would have made the Queen of Sheba envious and Jim's watch would have made King Solomon pluck his beard. The biblical scale makes the eight-dollar flat feel grand.
The Student by Anton Chekhov is built entirely on an allusion. Ivan retells the Gospel story of Peter warming himself by a fire and then denying Christ three times. The two widows he tells it to are standing by a fire. When one weeps, the allusion stops being a reference and becomes the present moment.
The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe gives Montresor a family motto, Nemo me impune lacessit, no one wounds me with impunity, which is also the motto of Scotland. He also plays on the word Mason, letting Fortunato mean the fraternity and himself mean the trowel. Both allusions are jokes only Montresor and the reader can hear.
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne fills its forest with real Salem names: Goody Cloyse and Martha Carrier, who were tried as witches in 1692. The historical allusion tells the reader that this Puritan nightmare had real victims, and that Brown's suspicion of his neighbours is the story's true horror.
The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde ends with the small boy the giant loved returning with wounds in his hands and feet, which he calls the wounds of Love, and inviting the giant to his garden, which is Paradise. Wilde never says the child's name. The allusion is unmistakable to a reader who knows the Gospels and merely mysterious to one who does not, and the story works either way.
Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville ends with the narrator's cry over Bartleby and over humanity, and earlier compares his clerk to a kind of ghost and the office to a tomb. The final anecdote about the Dead Letter Office is not an allusion but it functions like one, a real institution made to carry the weight of everything undelivered in the story.
How to use it in your own story
An allusion should reward the reader who catches it without punishing the one who does not. Test every reference against a reader who has never heard of it.
Common mistakes
Name-dropping is the obvious fault: references that display the author's reading and do nothing for the character. Subtler is the allusion that carries the story's meaning entirely, so a reader without the reference is locked out. Third is the mismatch of register, a working-class narrator suddenly citing Ovid.
Where readers meet it today
Modern stories that use allusion with control include Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, John Cheever's The Swimmer, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, Zadie Smith's The Embassy of Cambodia and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.
What writers can take from this
- The sentence must work for a reader who misses the reference.
- Choose allusions the narrator could plausibly know.
- One deep reference beats a scatter of names.
- Bring the allusion in through a character's mouth or hands where you can.
- Check the register: the reference must sound like this voice.
Try it yourself
Write a 600-word story in which a character retells a well-known older story (a fairy tale, a myth, a parable) to a listener who needs to hear it for a reason they never state. The retelling may occupy no more than a third of the piece.
Questions
What is an example of allusion in a short story?
O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi, which compares a poor couple's Christmas gifts to those of the wise men, and along the way invokes the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. The references lend biblical scale to an eight-dollar flat.
How do you identify an allusion?
Look for a proper name, phrase or event that points outside the story: a scripture, a myth, a historical figure, another book. Then ask what meaning the story imports by naming it and whether the sentence still works without it.
Is an allusion the same as a quotation?
No. A quotation reproduces words from a source; an allusion merely refers to it, often by a name or a detail. Chekhov's The Student retells a Gospel episode in the character's own words, which is allusion rather than quotation.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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